Keith

@Grumpy It's how a tall order is made. Start with an empty cone and add one scoop, then another on top of that, and so on. With only letters to work with the idea works.

@John I doubt you could get down from an emu ... safely.

@Beth in Greenbelt For the Londoners here, a pun on the song is "Skip to the Loo" but skipping may be detrimental for such a trip.

And then there's the Mexican sauce made with holy water: Holy Mole emu emu emu emu . . . it's emus all the way down

Another more in depth definition: Petrichor is the pleasant smell that often accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions. It was named by two Australian researchers, who discovered that the smell is an oily essence emitted from rocks or soils. The oil is a complicated mixture of at least fifty different compounds, rather like a perfume. The diverse nature of the host materials has led us to propose the name “petrichor” for this apparently unique odour which can be regarded as an “ichor” or “tenuous essence” derived from rock or stone. This name, unlike the general term “argillaceous odour”, avoids the unwarranted implication that the phenomenon is restricted to clays or argillaceous materials; it does not imply that petrichor is necessarily a fixed chemical entity but rather it denotes an integral odour. === I find the aroma pleasant and refreshing in the moments before, during, and after a passing rainstorm. ===

@JMF And I've always said "holy moly" which led me to making the pun joke "What is that Mexican sauce made using holy water? Holy mole?"

Or, a single die tumbling through the grid showing each of its six faces.

@Andrzej Yes. The best example is a combination tool. A 3-in-one might be a hammer, screwdriver, and wrench as all features of a single gadget. Oh, wait, there's always a bottle opener so my example would be a 4-in-one.

@Francis Even the smartest scientist will say that smarts do not succeed without experience. My experience has been that sometimes a sock works its way into a trouser leg and resides there until one is walking down the hall at the office or walking up to give a presentation. I have more than once found a missing sock of mine on the floor in the middle of a hallway. So, unless one sock has completely become lint, it probably left the dryer in trou .

We'll keep that idea on ice. Luckily we were able to buy Alaska.

@Tim There is no "awful origin" of the phrase. Read the Wikipedia article on "cakewalk" and you'll find that the cakewalk was "invented" by slaves. It is a good example of wonderful music and arts that came from that time and is not awful just because of the mention of slaves in its origin story.

@Andrzej Just a moment to explain LOSE A TURN. There are games, usually board games, that do not rely solely on a roll of the dice and instead employ a shuffled card deck that each player draws from during their "turn". The next time around, after drawing a dreaded LOSE A TURN card, the player is skipped over as a setback to progress.

@ojai ninja It is the contribution of a C grade to a GPA.

If you are short-staffed then you may need to have more than clef notes.

@Deb Amlen - Save that for Sept 19th.

@Thor Maybe it's the altitude.

And I'll add one more to that symmetry group. Mark Twain was born when Halley's comet was passing Earth and died when the comet returned some 75 years later. He made the statement during the year before his death: I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together".

@mezz On my Mac laptop I just hit the ESC key and it goes into rebus mode until I hit the RETURN key or click the cursor on some other location.

@Andrew It's in the clues, spelled out.

@kkseattle Look up "mechanically processed chicken". eew! emus!

@Rick Probably Hawaii. Just what is a straight border on the curved surface of Earth? And on uneven terrain, and ... nice emu ... nice emu !

@SShah As soon as it is ever repeated it would cease to be a ONE OFF. But, for example, a certain car model might be a ONE OFF for Dodge and then Mitsubishi makes an equivalent model, it is still a ONE OFF for Dodge as long as Dodge does not repeat producing that model. Usually ONE OFF will refer to artistic productions such as songs, carvings, etc.

@Barry Ancona It's going to be a blow out week so the same blow dry photo every day. :-)

@Wayne Harrison You can treat each clue as an answer as in the Jeopardy game show and if the host accepts your answer, fine, and lookups are not allowed. However you could allow yourself to do some things that don't cause the app to not let you get the gold star and lookups, for example, would be fine. Whatever your standards are...

@john ezra That reminds me of when I was in graduate school many years ago and on a whim I kept my collection of books arranged by color. My fellow students and friends didn't notice or didn't admit to noticing. I was rather adept at finding books by color ("Gravitation" was black, "Classical Electrodynamics" was green but its 2nd edition was red, "Topology" was blue, etc.). Today those texts are somewhat lost amongst the many colored books that I now have. I'm really beginning to appreciate digital format.

@Robert Ljungquist You are technically correct as some dictionaries say "a unit of weight equal to 1000 kilograms" when they should say "...equal to that of...". As I'm sure you know, it is common to confuse weight and mass because of the association due to the effect of gravity on mass. For a given mass its weight will depend upon the strength of the gravitational field acting upon it. So, the weight of an object can vary from place to place, even on Earth. It'll take the mass of >100 billion emus to remove this comment from existence.

@CCNY If you have not already, do the July bonus puzzle in the morning. emu later

@L Pilsner can have two Es as an alternate spelling. I've always seen the single E spelling in Coors ads (see Wikipedia too). TIL about the 2 E spelling. Online kitten chat: E-mew E-mew ... E-mew

I would have liked the super nova to expand outward from a central STAR but the puzzle construction is clever and ingenious none-the-less.

@Marshall Walthew Ovaltine of today is not the same as Ovaltine of yesteryear. The recipe has changed but mostly the flavor is close to the same as I remember. My favorite was always the malt version. I used to like the crunchy dark crystals that would float up to the top. Suddenly around 1978 the recipe went through a few iterations and the crystals were no more. The ingredients list for the first of those re-formulations of malt Ovaltine included silicon dioxide (many products still do). I wondered what that slightly gritty half-inch deep layer of sludge at the bottom of my drinking glass was until I realized that it was powdered glass! It is no longer that way, thank God.

@Francis I don't know. Some can think pretty strangely. I was about to tell a funny story involving P.A.M. Dirac but I've decided you all will have to wait until our cosmology book including a second generalization of relativity is published. It needs a few instances of comic relief.

@Helen To add icing on the cake your friend should have written him instructions on using the phone in cursive.

@Nancy -- Maybe because one action of an editor is to suggest changes or corrections this is an editor's note to change the misspelling of CATION to the correct ACTION. [At first I tried to fit a chemistry meaning of cation in which alter-cation becomes anion, but that made little sense in this case.]

@Steve L Oh ... wait... it is.

@Cat Lady Margaret And then there's the epistolary apostle Paul.

@Randolph That's exactly it. During a spate of internet connection instability it happened to me more than once. I learned by trial and error that a fix was to log out and then back in when the connection came back and then found things as you did. I had a long streak terminated because of the first unresolved occurrence.

@BarbP Maybe he meant 69 across being that the US is made up of those four corner regions. . . . . . but no emus except in zoos

@Fender Or perhaps qubit for nonbinary 🤔 . . . . . . emus with ruffled feathers